Politico reports that the idea to bathe the White House in rainbow lights was conceived months ago.

SPOTTED, at 4 a.m. Sat. at the White
House: Jeff Tiller, 32, the White House director of specialty media
(includes LGBT outreach) and former press-advance marvel, who had the
inspired idea of bathing the North Portico (“The President’s Front
Door”) in rainbow lighting. The crowds were gone, sunrise was coming,
and the lighting contractors who had installed the rainbow were long
asleep. After spending the night at the White House in a lawn chair,
Jeff climbed downstairs to the tradesman entrance to unplug the lights
that he had conceived of months earlier.

On June 26, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Obergefell v. Hodges,
holding that the Fourteenth Amendment requires that states issue
marriage licenses to same sex couples. Conservative media and the
National Rifle Association (NRA) quickly seized on the decision to draw a
parallel with concealed carry reciprocity, a top federal legislative
priority of the NRA. Reciprocity legislation, also known as federally
mandated concealed carry, would force states to recognize permits to
carry concealed guns issued by other states, regardless of what the
issuing state's standards are for issuing permits. Reciprocity
legislation has been introduced in both chambers of the U.S. Congress,
but conservative media and the NRA view Obergefell as an
opportunity to argue that the Constitution extends at least some right
to reciprocal permit recognition regardless of whether Congress acts.
The problem with that argument, however, is that the 2008 landmark
Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller limited the scope of the Second Amendment right to gun possession to people's homes.

With
a colorful White House backdrop, (L) Kevin Barragan and his partner
Adam Smith celebrate as do Kelly Miller (with glasses) and her wife
Lindsey Miller. The Millers were married two years ago in Washington
state where gay marriage is legal. The White House was lit in
multi-colored lights to honor the Supreme Court decision to allow gay
marriage, on June 26, 2015. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

Speaking
at a joint news conference Tuesday with Brazilian President Dilma
Rousseff, Obama made a point of saying just before leaving that one of
the best aspects of last week was viewing the crowds who had gathered in
front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to celebrate the symbol of gay pride
on full display.

Over the past three days, 26 million
people have super imposed rainbows over their Facebook profile pictures
using a free tool provided by the company. The rainbow filter launched
Friday and continued to gain steam over Pride weekend, garnering more
than half a billion likes and comments all over the world. Famous people
including Russell Simmons, California Attorney General Kamala Harris,
Leonardo DiCaprio, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Brazil's president
Dilma Rousseff changed their profiles. The tool was created by two
Facebook interns during an internal hackathon last week. Changing a
profile picture is easily dismissed as low-effort activism. But for many
people who are not typically political it was a way to quietly show
support.

Former outspoken social conservative Michael
Coren found ‘no condemnation, no cynicism, no grudges’ when he recently
spoke at a church focused on outreach to LGBT people.

Toronto Star / Paulo Marques

Journalist Michael Coren recently delivered a guest sermon at the Metropolitan Community Church.

By:Michael Coren Published on Mon Jun 29 2015

There she goes: plump, porky and with wings.
Yes, pigs can and do fly. Or to put it another way, we now have
undeniable proof of climate change because hell has frozen over. Michael
Coren, long a public opponent of same-sex marriage and certainly not
considered a friend to the gay community, is asked to preach at
Toronto’s Metropolitan Community Church.

MCC is not exclusively gay but its central
theme, its charisma if you like, is outreach to LGBT people and in all
of its many international branches it is at the heart of the struggle
for full equality. Indeed in Toronto its leader, Brent Hawkes, is one of
the most high-profile, visible and eloquent leaders of the gay
community.

It was Brent who invited me. I have written
before about how in the past two years I have undergone something of a
conversion on the road to Toronto, left the Roman Catholic Church,
abandoned social conservatism and become one of those liberal Christians
I used to mock. It’s been a pilgrimage and one that — while coming with
a heavy professional and personal cost — has made me a better person
and a better Christian.

I came to realize that anywhere there is love
there is God, that judgmentalism is vehemently anti-Christian and that I
had, well, got it wrong. In one of those glorious paradoxes my feelings
were confirmed by the sweeping, organized and vicious campaign against
me by social and Christian conservatives. By their lack of love you will
know them. Which is when Brent approached me and asked me to speak. We
have known each other for years because we often appeared on opposing
sides on television and radio; neither of us ever thought we’d be
embracing, close to tears, in front of the altar of his church.

I’ve spoken to hundreds of groups and haven’t
felt nervous for decades. Yet suddenly this 56-year-old man who hosted a
nightly television show for 16 years was most definitely nervous. How
many of these people had I hurt, how many had lives made more difficult
by my writing and broadcasting? I’d never hated but I had given an
intellectual veneer to the anti-gay movement, had enabled — even
unintentionally — some muddy bigotry.

There were two services, with a combined
congregation of around 700. And as I walked in on that hot, rainy
morning I was drenched in love and acceptance. No condemnation, no
cynicism, no grudges. As a constipated Englishman I was several times
close to weeping as I witnessed a sense of authentic Christian community
that I have, with all due respect, seldom found in mainstream church
settings. I saw collectives of warmth and support, groups of people from
various ethnicities, backgrounds, sexualities and experiences united in
acceptance. After three months of abuse, accusations and firings from
men and women who claim to be Christian my sense of liberation was
exquisite. A dawn of the miraculous after the dark night of the cruel.

I told them
that as a straight man who had reversed his position on gay rights and
marriage I had recently experienced a glimpse of a shadow of a whiff of
what it must be like to be a gay Christian. I said that some of the
finest Christians I had ever met had been gay Christians. I said that
remaining Christian in the face of hostility and even vitriol was an
indication of enormous depth of faith and a living, fleshy example of a
glorious mystery. I spoke of unconditional love, of what Scripture
actually said about sexuality rather than the popular and misguided
caricature of Biblical truth, I said that the only absolutes were grace
and love.

The point is that in the 200,000 words of the
New Testament perhaps a mere 50 in any way concern same-sex attraction,
yet tens of thousands speak of charity, care for the poor, forgiveness,
love, empathy, gentleness and kindness. At its best the church has led
the way for the state but on this issue the contrary is true, as we
witnessed with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision. There is still
time to do the right thing however. As I said, pigs can fly and Michael
Coren can speak at the Metropolitan Community Church.

The
paradox of our practice is that the most effective way of
transformation is to leave ourselves alone. The more we let everything
be just what it is, the more we relax into an open, attentive awareness
of one moment after another.

Monday, June 29, 2015

Parishioner: The best thing would be to accept gays

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) —Just
days after the Supreme Court’s historic ruling, extending the right to
marry to same-sex couples, the faithful headed to church for the first
time Sunday with the issue top of mind.

There is a flurry of rainbows on facebook,
in celebration of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decision on June 26,
2015, that 14th Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses
require states to license same-sex marriages and to recognize same-sex
marriages lawfully licensed and performed in other US states.

In a Bahai run group, a Bahai stated that Baha’is publicly supporting
gay rights will lead to grave consequences in other countries. It is an
argument I have heard many times before, and it holds no water. The
fact that our international administration is seated in Israel and that
Baha’is believe in a messenger of God after Muhammad are much stronger
reasons for any Muslim to be upset at Bahais.

We do not hear of Bahais
saying, we must stop public statements of belief in Baha’u’llah do we?
On the contrary, if Bahais were seen as were a source of comfort or
safety, in countries where gays and lesbians are oppressed, that would
do wonders for our image as a religion that preaches equality and
justice. I am not saying Bahais must be defenders for the oppressed, but it sounds like a good idea to me.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Obama called the Supreme Court decision
requiring states to recognize same-sex marriage “a victory for
America.” Now the Commander in Chief is set to honor those who fought
for marriage equality by issuing an executive order declaring 6/26/16
National Equality Day.

The right for same-sex marriage has been recognized, and the
apocalypse didn't happen. Time will show the irrationality of the fears.

Religious freedom didn't fail. Religious oppression did. People
went to church today and worshipped much as they did last week. Church
doors were not closed. Police didn't haul ministers of the gospel off to
jail. The millions of marriages in America between a man and a woman
did not immediately come to an end.

Only two things in the rights of
the LGBTQ community were decided this week. States couldn't block
same-sex marriage, and they had to recognize same-sex marriages
performed in other states. Some states have chosen to obfuscate. Others
wisely accepted the inevitable. But the fight isn't over.

The seeds have been planted for full LGBTQ equality in the secular
society of our country. The religious communities must now struggle with
how they move forward.

These
are like the three legs of a tripod. It is uncertain whether we can
accomplish the dharma if one of these three legs is missing. If all
three are present, however, we would be more likely to miss the ground
with a hammer than we would be to miss enlightenment.

“Relationships are the best way to learn. They prepare us so that we
may learn how to love and relate to God. God already knows who we are
and does not need us to reveal ourselves, but the person with whom we
are relating needs us to open up to them and to accept their revelation
as well. To do this, we need to go beyond our pride and fear. It takes
courage to face unpleasant truths about our partner and about
ourselves.”

Buddhist same-sex marriage was born in the USA. That’s a little known
but significant fact to reflect on now, just after the Supreme Court
has declared legal marriage equality throughout the country.
Appropriately enough, it all started in San Francisco, and was conceived
as an act of love, not activism.

The first known Buddhist same-sex marriages took place in the early
1970s, at the Buddhist Church of San Francisco. Founded in 1899, it’s
the oldest surviving temple in the mainland United States. It’s also
part of the oldest Buddhist organization outside Hawaii: the Buddhist
Churches of America (BCA), part of the Shin tradition of Pure Land
Buddhism.

During the Nixon years, the LGBTQ rights movement was picking up, and
San Francisco was one of the primary centers of both activism and
community building. Located not far from the famously gay Castro
District, the Buddhist Church of San Francisco (BCSF) was attended by
singles and couples, gay and straight. As consciousness rose, people
began to seek the same services that heterosexuals already enjoyed in
American society.

A male couple in the congregation eventually asked Rev. Koshin Ogui,
then assigned to BCSF, to perform their marriage. He readily agreed, and
the ceremony was held in the main hall—identical to other marriages at
the temple, except for the dropping of gender-based pronouns in the
service.

Without fanfare, history was made.

Soon other BCA temples were also conducting same-sex marriages, and
by the time of my research into the subject in the early 2010s, I
couldn’t find a single minister in the scores of BCA temples who was
unwilling to preside over same-sex weddings. Indeed, BCA ministers had
already performed marriages for gay and lesbian couples, bisexuals,
transgender people, and polyamorous groups. Many of these were
interracial marriages, or carried out for non-Buddhists who had nowhere
else to go, though most were for members of local BCA temples.

The BCA and its sister organization in Hawaii had gone on record
years earlier in support of marriage equality, and even lobbied the
government to change the law. This support for LGBTQ rights has been
recognized by the Smithsonian, which collected a rainbow-patterned robe
worn by the BCSF’s current minister for the museum’s permanent
collection.

I’m ordained in the Shin tradition, so I was already aware of Shin
inclusivity. (Indeed, though I’m not gay myself, I would not have joined
any organization that failed to support LGBTQ rights.) But the
historian in me itched to explain this phenomenon more comprehensively.
Why was the BCA the first Buddhist organization to move toward marriage
equality, and why hadn’t this movement provoked rancor and conservative
resistance, as we’ve seen in so many other American religious
denominations?

In searching for answers, I came to several interrelated conclusions.
First, the history of racial and religious discrimination that the
originally Japanese-American BCA faced (everything from mob violence to
WWII internment camps) instilled revulsion for discrimination in Shin
circles. Second, since Shin ministers are not celibate (the tradition
was founded by a married monk in 13th-century Japan), they share
lifestyles similar to their parishioners, and thus readily empathize
with them on matters of sexuality and social relationships, which may be
more abstract to celibate monks and nuns.But most importantly, what minister after minister told me was that
the fundamental point of Shin Buddhism is that Amida Buddha embraces all
beings without any exceptions, without any judgments, without any
discrimination. Amida opens the way to the Pure Land (and thus
liberation) to the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the good
and the bad, the black and the white. Therefore, Amida Buddha also
embraces the gay and the straight, the gender-conforming and everyone
else, without any hesitation. It is this spirit that led Shin ministers
to open their doors to same-sex couples, led Shin temples to march in
Pride parades across the country, to pass proclamations affirming
same-sex rights and marriage in particular, and to carry out education
programs in their own communities.

The Shin community hasn’t been alone in supporting LGBTQ communities
in American Buddhist circles. Though not as quickly or comprehensively,
many other Buddhist groups have also moved toward performing same-sex
marriages and affirming the value of their LGBTQ members. In the 1980s, a
handful of same-sex marriages were performed by non-BCA teachers,
including Sarika Dharma of the International Buddhist Meditation Center
in Los Angeles. By the end of the 1990s, American Tibetan, Theravada,
and Zen teachers had all performed the first same-sex marriages in those
respective traditions as well, and Soka Gakkai had gone from seeing
homosexuality as a condition to be cured through Buddhist practice to
performing large numbers of same-sex marriages for its members.

All of this was taking place in a country without legal recognition
for married same-sex couples. They performed those ceremonies even
though they knew the state would not recognize them, because it was the
right thing to do.

Today those marriages are equal to everyone else’s, and there are
signs that marriage equality is gaining acceptance in parts of Buddhist
Asia. Taiwan held its first Buddhist same-sex marriage in 2012, with two
brides in white dresses and veils presided over by a traditional
shaven-headed nun. In Kyoto, Japan, Rev. Kawakami Taka of Shunkoin
temple not only performs same-sex marriages at his historic Rinzai Zen
temple, but has also partnered with local hotel, flower, and similar
vendors to provide wedding packages for same-sex couples arriving from
around the world. Step by step, the movement continues.

On Saturday morning, June 27, I gave keynote address for a seminar at
the New York Buddhist Church, “Embraced by the Heart of Amida Buddha:
The LGBTQ Community and Shin Buddhism.” It’s part of an educational
campaign that the BCA’s Center for Buddhist Education carries out every
year in late June. Speakers talked about their experiences as gay,
lesbian, and transgender Buddhists, and on Sunday we’ll walk in the New
York Pride parade with members of the temple. We had no idea that our
event would occur at such a historic moment, but now we know that we’ll
be marching as an act of pure celebration, rather than hope and
defiance.

Despite the positive record of many sanghas and individuals,
discrimination and ignorance remain widespread in American Buddhism.
That isn’t something that will change overnight with a single Supreme
Court decision, no matter how momentous. But we can genuinely take heart
that American Buddhists have been working for marriage equality for
more than 40 years, and that Buddhists of many traditions spoke out for
equality and contributed to the movement that led to today’s ruling.

Jeff Wilson, a Tricycle contributing
editor, is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian
Studies at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. His most
recent book is Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture (Oxford University Press).

I
cannot keep love alive in my own heart if I would deny the same to
someone else. Love is not selective in that way but is rather an
affectionate generosity that wishes the same for all. Withheld, love
isolates itself and won't long survive. A lifetime relationship of
enduring love, kindness, and understanding is rare enough in human
affairs without anyone trying to legislate who gets a shot at it and who
doesn't.

Friday, June 26, 2015

"I never believed this would happen in my lifetime when I wrote my first several TNR essays and then my book, Virtually Normal,
and then the anthology and the hundreds and hundreds of talks and
lectures and talk-shows and call-ins and blog-posts and articles in the
1990s and 2000s. I thought the book, at least, would be something I
would have to leave behind me – secure in the knowledge that its
arguments were, in fact, logically irrefutable, and would endure past my
own death, at least somewhere. I never for a millisecond thought I
would live to be married myself. Or that it would be possible for
everyone, everyone in America. But it has come to pass. All of it. In one fell, final swoop. Know hope." - Andrew Sullivan, returning to his blog to spike the ball.

Few
things can improve the nature of our relationships as much as the
development of skillful speech. Silence offers us, and those around us,
the spaciousness we need to speak more skillfully. When we speak with
greater skill, our true self?our compassionate, loving self?emerges with
gentle ease.